Who belongs Part 1
This is my family a couple of years ago, and here is a more recent photo:
Recently, in the car on the way to the camping trip pictured above, a discussion came up about the time my son was asked to open his backpack in our local grocery store. My son has a tendency to gallop ahead of us and I caught the tail end of that exchange with the security guard. I mentioned that son and I were regularly going into that same store with lots of bags on because we’re biking to shop and they weren’t asking him to surrender his backpack. My husband mentioned that son had been asked to check-in his backpack on another occasion when they had gone in the store and I wasn’t there. Hmm, I raised my eyebrows, “I guess being with an older white lady lowers his threat level.” This is both a comment on how the world perceives my son, and I think there’s a pretty good lesson here on what it means when he’s seen as “black”. At that point in the conversation, rather than saying, hey I get to convey some of my white privilege to our son when you aren’t around, I could have argued that my husband was imagining what he saw taking place. But I didn’t, which is what you learn after being together almost 30 years and taking the time to listen without prejudging a situation.
A bit of background, my son is a very compliant child. Part of that is his nature, but like many ASD (autism spectrum disorder) kids, his approach is pretty binary and rule dependent/compliant. When I pick him up at the Reflections on Teaching » Blog Archive » Who belongs Part 1: